In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon R7 360 v3 are very slightly better than the AMD Radeon HD 5850 MSI Twin Frozr II 1GB Edition.

The R7 360 has a 325 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 5850, but the HD 5850 has 24 more Texture Mapping Units than the R7 360. As a result, the HD 5850 exhibits a 1.8 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the R7 360. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The R7 360 has a 325 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 5850, but the HD 5850 has 16 more Render Output Units than the R7 360. As a result, the HD 5850 exhibits a 6.4 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the R7 360. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The R7 360 was released over three years more recently than the HD 5850, and so the R7 360 is likely to have far better driver support, meaning it will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the HD 5850 when running the latest games.

The R7 360 has 1024 MB more video memory than the HD 5850, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. However, the overall memory performance is about the same.

The HD 5850 has 16 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the R7 360, which means that the memory performance of the HD 5850 is slightly better than the R7 360.

The Radeon R7 360 v3 has 768 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 5850 MSI Twin Frozr II 1GB Edition has 1440. However, the actual shader performance of the R7 360 is 685 and the actual shader performance of the HD 5850 is 522. The R7 360 having 163 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the HD 5850 performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The R7 360 transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the HD 5850. This means that the R7 360 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the HD 5850.

The Radeon R7 360 v3 requires 100 Watts to run and the Radeon HD 5850 MSI Twin Frozr II 1GB Edition requires 151 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the R7 360 and a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the HD 5850. The HD 5850 requires 51 Watts more than the R7 360 to run. The difference is significant enough that the HD 5850 may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the R7 360.